The Arab Spring has failed because constitutional democracy needs nation-states

Car bombs blasted through another Arab city yesterday, killing 27 people and injuring more than 350. This time, it was Tripoli’s turn. Not the Libyan capital, but the ancient Phoenician settlement in northern Lebanon – though, with the violence so widespread, it’s hard to keep up. The past week has seen car bombs in Amara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Iskanadariyah and Nasiriyah, to say nothing of the gas attacks in the Syrian capital, the grisly murder of Egyptian police officers in Sinai or the seizure of Libya’s eastern oil fields by rebel groups.

No one talks of an Arab Spring any more. Shakespeare, as I never tire of pointing out, has apt words for every human situation:

The spring, the summer,The childing autumn, angry winter, changeTheir wonted liveries, and the mazed world,By their increase, now knows not which is which:And this same progeny of evils comesFrom our debate, from our dissension

What is happening to the region, so recently optimistic? Some worldly types will tell you that there is no such thing as a successful Muslim democracy, but this is demonstrably untrue. Full-scale liberal democracy is rare outside Europe and the Anglosphere but, by global standards, Islamic countries do well enough. To pluck examples from opposite ends of the ummah, Albania and Malaysia have both held free elections in recent months without anyone being exiled or shot.

No, there a more local explanation, its roots stretching back a century. A couple of months ago, the London Review of Books carried a penetrating article on the Syrian insurrection by the veteran correspondent Patrick Cockburn entitled 'Is it the end of Sykes-Picot?' The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement was an accord between Britain and France (with a minor role for their Tsarist Russian ally) on how to dismember the Ottoman Empire against which they were then at war. It is forgotten in the countries that authored it, but keenly remembered in those it created.

Sykes and Picot – representing, respectively, the British and French governments – carved up the eastern part of the Ottoman lands more or less arbitrarily. Ever wondered why the borders of Jordan, Iraq and Syria are made up of so many straight lines? When the Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, asked him how he planned to demarcate the French and British zones, Sykes ‘sliced his finger across the map that lay before them on the table. “I should like to draw a line from the “e” in Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk,” he said.’

The resulting states were wholly synthetic, lacking ethnic or religious identity. Iraq exists in its present form largely because, in order to yoke the oil-rich Ottoman provinces of Mosul and Basra together, the British Government had to include Baghdad. Along with Jordan, it was placed under an imported monarch, a son of the Sharif of Mecca.

The Sykes-Picot accord created governments where there were no nations. People were capriciously sundered from their co-religionists, and demographic maps resembled fruit salads (see image above). Lebanon, where no single group constituted a majority, has suffered a series of sectarian wars ever since. In Syria and Iraq, minority groups exercised dictatorial rule over the majorities. Even Egypt, the country with the longest period of continuous identity within something approximating its present borders, was keen to amalgamate with neighbours – an aspiration recalled in the red-white-and-black flags common to several of them.

Freedom under the rule of law is almost unknown outside nation-states. The Ottoman Empire, like its Habsburg and Romanov neighbours, had held together because it had no pretensions to democracy. But constitutional liberty requires a measure of patriotism, meaning a readiness to accept your countrymen’s disagreeable decisions, to abide by election results when you lose, to pay taxes to support strangers.

To put it another way, democracy functions best within units where people feel that they have enough in common with one another to accept government from each other’s hands. Take the demos out of democracy, and you are left with the kratos: the power of a state that must compel what it cannot ask in the name of civil loyalty.

In the absence of nation-states, cross-border affinities magnify, which is why the Syrian conflict risks becoming a regional Sunni-Shia war.

‘If the Syrian opposition is victorious,’ said Iraq’s prime minister earlier this year, ‘there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan, and a sectarian war in Iraq.’ It has already begun: the blasts outside the Sunni mosques in Tripoli yesterday – following blasts in a Shia area of Beirut earlier this week – were the grim starting gun.

If sectarian loyalties are strong, loyalties within states are conversely weak. Neither side in Egypt evinces the slightest understanding of compromise, let alone of power-sharing. Political rivals are treated as enemies, not as co-citizens. The junta is rounding up members of the Muslim Brotherhood under martial law. Several opposition activists have died in custody, and there are credible reports that their children are being targeted. It’s a similar story in Iraq and Syria. 'Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.'

Of all the post-Ottoman states, only Turkey made a success of democracy. The founders of the republic set out to purge the ramshackle excrescences of supra-nationalism, abolishing the Caliphate and replacing Persian and Arabic-derived words in their language with Turkish neologisms, adapted by lexicographers from the speech of the Turkic nomads of Central Asia. A brutal war with Greece led to population exchanges and the birth, for the first time, of a consciously Turkish national entity.

There was a downside: minorities felt excluded, and there was sporadic unrest in Kurdish areas – though the present Turkish government has, to its credit, done much to soothe that dispute. Still, the point holds: Turkey, being a nation-state, was able to sustain a meaningful, if sometimes flawed, rule of law.

How can more heterogeneous places replicate Turkey’s success? Border adjustments could help, though the population of the Middle East is too intermingled to make ethnographic frontiers feasible everywhere. But devolution can make a difference. Internal self-rule has brought Iraqi Kurds a measure of happiness and prosperity previously unknown. Syria’s Kurds have taken advantage of the fighting to establish a similar autonomy, though their leaders insist they have no desire to secede. Perhaps cantonalism – self-governing units for Maronites, Druze, Alawites, Syriacs and so on – might facilitate an eventual transition to democratic pluralism.

Sadly, we are nowhere near such an outcome, and it is hard to see anything that the West might do to help. If a decade of occupation and hundreds of thousands of soldiers failed to pacify Iraq, how can we realistically hope to stabilise Syria or Egypt?

The days when we could draw lines on maps are gone. Events are beyond our control – though this doesn’t mean we should make unforced errors, as when we held back from immediately condemning the coup in Egypt. I wish I had a solution, but the prospects of the region are so dark that, as usual, it takes our national poet to do them justice:

Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,And in this seat of peace tumultuous warsShall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny Shall here inhabit, and this land be call’d The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.